The first attack doesn’t come from the enemy.
It comes in silence—when the air stutters, when the crows stop circling the Keep, when the earth rumbles under bare feet like a war drum from a hundred lifetimes ago.
Vera stands on the ramparts, staring down at Black Veil.
She blinks—not from fatigue, but from overload. Too much. Too much clarity. Too much power. Too much of the moon is still pulsing through her veins.
Everything is too bright.
Too sharp.
She can see every puff of steam rising from Rael’s nostrils as he prowls the courtyard below in wolf form, twice the size of the next largest shifter. His black fur is glistening with oil, claws carving trenches into stone.
He feels it too.
Something is coming.
And it’s already inside the gates.
The first vampire doesn’t emerge.
It
